The Dawn Treader

Sterilization was the forerunner to mass murder.

Ironically, Nazi Germany considered itself behind the United States in the sterilization movement in the 1920s.  Fritz Lenz, a German physician-eugenicist advocate of sterilization (and later a leading ideologue of racial hygiene), marveled at eugenics research programs in the United States such as the one at Cold Spring Harbor in New York.   He berated his fellow Germans for their backwardness compared to the Americans in 1923. 

The United States also had laws in 25 states providing for the compulsory sterilization of the criminally insane and other people considered genetically inferior.  Thankfully, these laws were eventually rolled back due to concerns about individual rights.  Such concerns for individual rights were trumped by national concerns in Nazi Germany.  The focus was on serving the race by intentionally strengthening it and preventing it from extinction.

Hitler, in 1924, declared the sacred racial mission of the German people to be "assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements and slowly and surely raising them to a dominant positions."  He specifically mentioned sterilization as part of his vision.  For him, the stakes were absolute: "if the power to fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right to live in this world of struggle ends."  Mein Kampf, pp 403-4

Once in power, the Nazi regime made sterilization the first application of its biomedical program.  Wilhem Frick, the interior minister, introduced an early sterilization law and declared that the German people were in grave danger without it.  The tone for the regime's medicalized approach to life unworthy of life was set.

Included among the hereditarily sick to be sterilized were the categories of congenital feeblemindedness, including schizophrenia, manic depressive insanity, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, grave bodily malformation, hereditary alcholism.  Projected totals for the steriliziation: 410,000 Germans.  Special "Hereditary Health Courts" were established to make sterilization decisions.

Intense debates ensued about the breadth of such sterilizations.  Perhaps the sterilization should go beyond the impaired and weak, and include their relatives as well.  After all, they might be carriers of genetic deficiencies.  Fritz Lenz carried it the farthest, suggesting that sterilization be done to people who showed slight signs of mental illness, knowing full well that 20 percent of the German population would be affected in such a scenario!

Politics did enter into the diagnosis.  Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary and close associate, instructed physicians that the moral and political behavior of a person be considered in making the diagnosis of feeblemindedness.

No one really knows how many people were sterilized in Nazi Germany.  Reliable estimates are generally between 200,000 and 350,000 people.

In association with sterilization laws, steps were taken to establish a national card index of people with hereditary taints.  Special research institutes for hereditary biology and racial hygiene were set up at universities.  Genetic information, extending back several generations, was gathered and used in these institutions.

There did not seem to be much opposition to sterilization in Germany.   The Catholic church disapproved, but only intervened to the point of asking for doctors and lawyers who were Catholic to be exempt from enforcing sterilization laws.  Moral concerns surfaced a little, but were put down with arguments asserting that the life of the nation took precedence over "dogma and conflicts of conscience."

The stage was set for "mercy" killings: the euthanasia of impaired children.